Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s the peri-menopause kicking up a few notches. Anyway, in the last few weeks I’d say I’ve had to look up about 8 different words. Only one of them was something written/mentioned on Fluther. I won’t say what word it was so as not to give the writer a false or haughty sense of their own superior intelligence, hee hee.

The other words were from one particular friend on Facebook (who is known for being above average in intelligence and a very good wordsmith) the news, a radio commentator, and some from current books I’ve been reading.

All of the words are fairly common, except for one that I had never heard in my life. It was the word palissy. With the others, I’ve heard them all many times before, but I realized just in these last few weeks, when I read or heard these particular words, that I never did actually know what they meant, although the sentences as whole units made sense.

I’m college educated and reasonably intelligent, at least I like to think that I am, but in these last few weeks, I’ve sort of begun to question my intelligence regarding this situation. I’m a lover of words, and can be quite verbose, as some of you know. And don’t worry, it’s not like I knew the definitions of these words before and have somehow lost that knowledge, I have just been having realizations that I had never known the definitions before. I guess I never really thought about it before because I understood the sentences as a whole units. It’s just that lately, some of these words seem to be painted in bright purple and stand out to me.

Have any of you had to look up any words lately? If so, does it seem like more than the usual number, or is it about the same?

Topics: English, writing, words, language, reading, books, definitions, hearing, speech, listening, intelligence, written word, common words, ten dollar words